Are we who we are because of the country we were born in, the parents we were born to, the social class we belong to?
Or is it because of our lived experiences, our childhood, the things that happen to us and shape our lives?
Or is there something else beneath it all, something deep down, a distinctiveness that defines us and makes us unique?
These are the questions that led me to create The Darkness of Colours. I have always questioned the decisions I take, wondering whether I am making choices based on my own authentic will or whether I am influenced by factors I have not chosen. Sometimes it is hard to tell these things apart. For example, I love mate (pronounced, mah-tay). Mate is a herbal infusion, drunk from a round bombilla using a metal straw, and it is a very popular drink here in my country, Argentina. In fact, as I write these words, I have a mate on the table next to me. Given this is a local custom, little known beyond Argentina and Uruguay, if I had been born elsewhere, I might not even know it exists. I wonder then, do I like mate because I truly like mate, or do I like mate because we Argentinians drink it from the moment we get out of bed?
I believe in the power of fiction and the power of questions, and I like to combine them.
It’s 1885 in Buenos Aires. A man kidnaps five babies and embarks on an experiment: to raise each child in a different way and observe the results. In order to avoid any sentimentality, rather than a name, he gives each child a colour: Green, Blue, Black, Brown and White. They are cruel experiments. One of the children is brought up to believe he is a dog. Another is deprived of daylight and forced to fight against wild animals.
Twenty-five years later, the kidnapped children return, but they have no memory of where they have been. A journalist is brought in to investigate and as he starts to delve into the case, the perpetrators of the experiment begin to turn up dead.
This is a brief summary of the plot of The Darkness of Colours and, as I previously mentioned, my desire was to write about this elusive topic called identity.
My initial plan was to write a short story, but I soon realised I had enough ideas to make it a full novel. I thought it would be interesting to situate the events in the past, specifically at the turn of the twentieth century, in part because carrying out the same experiment today would involve topics such as genetics and other technological issues which I was not so interested in discussing. For me, these years – 1885-1910 – are also among some of the most interesting in human history. It is a moment of great scientific advancement, during which a large part of the modern world as we know it today was configured. It is the period when the avant-garde emerged, when artists decided a picture can show more than what we see with our eyes alone, when musicians began to abandon traditional harmonies and writers realised that a novel or a tale can do more than simply tell a story. And to that we add the arrival of cinema, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ultimately new ways of viewing the world that still influence us today. They were years when the word “progress” was used for everything, where humanity placed all of its hopes in a future which, just a few short years later, would be shown to be not quite so brilliant. This was therefore the perfect moment for a man like Andrew to embark on his experiment in search of discovering the true capacity of human beings. I decided the novel would open and close around the festivities celebrating the first centenary of Argentina as a nation in 1910. Are countries themselves not great experiments? At times, that’s how it feels here in my country, at least. Argentina is a country where immigration plays a fundamental role. Around the turn of the twentieth century when the book is set, thousands of people from across the globe – most of them poor – arrived in Argentina with nothing but the hope of making themselves a future in the “New World”. That’s how it was for my family. My grandparents and great-grandparents belong to that world of immigrants I describe in the novel. My paternal grandfather came from Spain with absolutely nothing at the age of just 14. In the same way, my maternal great-grandfather arrived from Italy. I am a product of this immigration.
I have included many details about the difference spaces in my city, about the architecture. I decided to use the same streets where I live, the old part of Buenos Aires, and I had to spend a lot of time investigating how my city was back then. It was great to walk the streets I have walked along my whole life, dreaming about how they might have been more than a century earlier.
If I am honest, I never thought that this book would reach so many readers so far away. To my surprise, it is now being read in many countries with identities and customs that are completely different to my own (countries for example, where they don’t drink mate). For me, it is a story so deeply tied to my city that I struggled to believe that anyone outside it would be interested in reading it. Perhaps we are not so different. Perhaps the important questions are the same. I am immensely grateful to anyone who decides to read this book and I hope you enjoy the story. While it is completely fictitious, at the same time it is a postcard from my country, my city and our history. In all its colours. And all its darkness.
By Martín Blasco
Argentina, 2024
Translated by Claire Storey
The Darkness of Colours - July 18th